Tagged: Apologetics

In his helpful and encouraging book, Why Believe the Bible?, John MacArthur gives reasons why we can believe that the Bible is the inerrant and authoritative word of God, and describes the importance and benefits of knowing and studying the Bible for the Christian life. In it he answers the charge made by many that the Bible isn’t actually God’s words, written down by common, sinful, yet Spirit-inspired men, but that it’s merely the thoughts of men – admittedly, men of great intellect and literary genius. The charge may be expressed as: “The Bible is full of errors and mistakes and it certainly is fallible at many points, but in regard to its ethics, its morals and its insights into humanity it reveals genius at a very high level.” So MacArthur, I think very reasonably, responds like this:

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“[This view] doesn’t hold up. For one, smart men wouldn’t write a book that condemned them all [see Romans 3: 9-18]. Smart men wouldn’t write a book that provided salvation from the outside. Smart men want to provide their own salvation; they do not want to have to trust in a perfect sacrifice made by God’s Son. And one other thing: Even the smartest of men could never conceive of a personality like Jesus Christ. Even the most gifted fiction writer could not fabricate a character who would surpass any human being who ever lived in purity, love, righteousness and perfection.” (46-47)

I’ve just started Handbook of Christian Apologetics (InterVarsity Press, 1994), the classic work by Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, two professors of philosophy at Boston College. Already it’s an engaging and highly stimulating read, with gems like this: “All the arguments in this book, and in all the books on apologetics (the defense of a religious system through the use of reasoned arguments) ever written, are worth less in the eyes of God than a single act of love to him or to your neighbor,” and “Apologetics gets at the heart through the head. The head is important precisely because it is a gate to the heart. We can love only what we know.”

In it they provide the following neat analogy to explain the difference between the intellect and the will and how they interact with each other as one reasons and comes to believe in something:

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“The intellect is the soul’s navigator, but the will is its captain. The intellect is its Mr. Spock, the will is its Captain Kirk, and the feelings are its Dr. McCoy. The soul is an ‘Enterprise,’ a real starship. The will can command the intellect to think, but the intellect cannot command the will to will, only inform it, as a navigator informs the captain. Yet the will cannot simply make you believe. It can’t force the intellect to believe what appears to it to be false, or to disbelieve what seems to it to be true. Belief is what happens when you decide to be honest and put your mind in the service of truth.” (31)

I just read this brilliant little reflection by Lewis in The Joyful Christian, a collection of 127 readings from his various nonfiction works, including Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters. This really does not need much by way of introduction, I think. Enjoy, and perhaps more importantly, allow yourself to be challenged if you’ve found yourself thinking of God in these terms!

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“The Russians, I am told, report that they have not found God in outer space. On the other hand, a good many people in many different times and countries claim to have found God, or been found by God, here on earth.

“The conclusion some want us to draw from these data is that God does not exist. As a corollary, those who think they have met Him on earth were suffering from a delusion.

“But other conclusions might be drawn:

1. We have not yet gone far enough in space. There had been ships in the Atlantic for a good time before America was discovered.

2. God does exist but is locally confined to this planet.

3. The Russians did find God in space without knowing it because they lacked the requisite apparatus for detecting Him.

4. God does exist but is not an object either located in a particular part of space nor diffused, as we once thought ‘ether’ was, throughout space.

“The first two conclusions do not interest me. The sort of religion for which they could be a defense would be a religion for savages: the belief in a local deity who can be contained in a particular temple, island, or grove. That, in fact, seems to be the sort of religion about which the Russians – or some Russians, and a good many people in the West – are being irreligious. It is not in the least disquieting that no astronauts have discovered a god of that sort. The really disquieting thing would be if they had.

“Space travel really has nothing to do with the matter. To some, God is discoverable everywhere; to others, nowhere. Those who do not find Him on earth are unlikely to find Him in space. (Hang it all, we’re in space already; every year we go a huge circular tour in space.) But send a saint up in a spaceship and he’ll find God in space as he found God on earth. Much depends on the seeing eye” (5-6).

My most recent personal tussle with questions about the Christian faith thankfully led me to Michael Novak’s unusually thoughtful No One Sees God (Doubleday, 2008). In this book Novak, a Catholic scholar, posits that Atheists and Christians have more in common than they think, namely that both are in important respects “in the dark” about God. Here he tackles – with a thoughtfulness that is hard to find in most popular books about faith – some of the most formidable objections to faith in God, including the question of whether God is truly a God of “ultimate kindness” given the reality of suffering we see every day. He responds simply but profoundly, pointing to the universal phenomenon of gratefulness, and with it, mere existence, as a large sign pointing to the goodness of God:

“During my seventy-four years, I have met extremely few people who are not grateful for the very fact of life, fresh air, the taste of water on a dry day, the stars and moon at night. It may be surprising how often even people who are very poor, or who suffer mightily from cancer or other illness, give thanks for the good things they have received from the Almighty. There are not many people who think everything is bleak, that death is better than life, that nothingness is better than being. Just existing has a sweet taste to it, even in extremities” (115).

Javier

I'm a husband, father, and a Christian, and I work in international affairs. I'm also a bibliophile. I mostly read books on theology, history, politics, and philosophy. This is where I share some of the best things I come across in my reading.